From a Seth Godin post:
If a well functioning adult puts in sufficient time and the effort, she’ll succeed.
This continues to wind me up.
Back in the days when we were more sexist, we may have said such things as ‘how many policemen are currently on the beat’ or ‘how dangerous is it to be a fireman?’. But then we became more politically correct and now we call them police officers and firefighters. And in my opinion, that’s a very good thing.
What we didn’t do was start calling all police officers, policewomen. Nor did we start calling all firefighters, firewomen. That would be absurd. So why do some people think it makes any sense to randomly start swapping out ‘he’ for ‘she’?
Just use ‘they’.
Some people argue that this isn’t grammatically correct. Such people don’t understand that the English language is an evolving one. Bad grammar is not about just breaking the rules; it is about breaking them because you are being sloppy. Consciously and carefully replacing ‘he’ with ‘they’ in appropriate contexts is great grammar.
This is from the dictionary on my Mac:
USAGE 1 The word they (with its counterparts them, their, and themselves) as a singular pronoun to refer to a person of unspecified sex has been used since at least the 16th century. In the late 20th century, as the traditional use of he to refer to a person of either sex came under scrutiny on the grounds of sexism, this use of they has become more common. It is now generally accepted in contexts where it follows an indefinite pronoun such as anyone, no one, someone, or a person:: anyone can join if they are a resident;: each to their own. In other contexts, coming after singular nouns, the use of they is now common, although less widely accepted, esp. in formal contexts. Sentences such as : ask a friend if they could help are still criticized for being ungrammatical. Nevertheless, in view of the growing acceptance of they and its obvious practical advantages, they is used in this dictionary in many cases where he would have been used formerly.
I notice the insane use of ‘she’ as a gender neural pronoun less often than I used to. I don’t often notice the weird ‘s/he’ formation or even the longwinded ‘he or she’ like I used to either. So perhaps most of us have settled on using ‘they’. Or perhaps I am just noticing the annoying forms less.
Whatever.
Today I noticed it and got annoyed and wrote a post.
Stop it!